Nokia's vice president Bryan Biniak: "We are trying to evolve the cultural thinking [at Microsoft] to say 'time is of the essence'. Waiting until the end of your fiscal year when you need to close your targets, doesn't do us any good when I have phones to sell today." Later Biniak adds: "As a company we don't want to rely on somebody else and sit and wait for them to get it right." There was a simple solution to this problem.

History merely repeated itself which makes Nokia's failure to anticipate Texas Instruments' leaving the business even more mystifying. TI had already demonstrated it was unwilling to absorb the risk of paying for itself the cost of the newest fabs just to satisfy a customer in its former relationship with Sun. TI's business model is based around dominating segments, such as I believe today analog, not trying to slug it out risking untold billions in fabs.

There was a time when Sun's fabless strategy looked like genius, back when there were more candidate fabs, especially in the US. And then there weren't because good business relationship don't work like that with one party assuming all the risk and the other freeloading. Sun had a programming language Java which it had tailored for multi-threading, and it had machines it was trying to design to exploit large numbers of threads, but found itself unable to produce those machines because it had failed to develop suitable long-lasting relationships with fab partners.